


What I Know

by superfluouskeys



Category: Maleficent (2014), Sleeping Beauty (1959), Sleeping Beauty (Fairy Tale), Sleeping Beauty - All Media Types, Sleeping Beauty - Fandom
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 18:42:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6435976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The family and advisors of the ascendant Queen Briar Rose would like to know why the evil fairy Maleficent, who has been personally responsible for so much of the suffering in her life, should feel entitled to come to her daughter's christening.  The Queen doesn't know how to respond.  [Kind of OUAT-verse, kind of fairytale-based, kind of just whatever.  Eventual femmeslash.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	What I Know

**Author's Note:**

> This is loosely based on some way-outdated fan theories regarding Once Upon a Time-verse Maleficent, plus some postulation from a lovely friend on tumblr awhile back. It's not really OUAT-verse since I don't acknowledge anything after about season 2, but I guess that's what the borrowed characters most closely resemble. I hope that you will enjoy, and share your thoughts!

**Chapter 1 - A Reflection of a Reflection**

"The wretched thing actually claimed to be a personal friend of her Majesty, the Queen.  Can you imagine!"

Briar Rose's fingers curled about the armrest of her throne.

"Isn't that just too much, darling?"

She flinched, turned her head to meet the King's gaze as slowly as possible.  "Too much," she agreed quietly.

The voices and mocking faces of the King's advisors became distorted in Briar Rose's perception, as though she were underwater, and the memory of the strange woman she'd met in the woods so many years ago seemed to her suddenly far more real and immediate than anything else in the room.

A trick of the curse?  That was what everyone would have her believe.  Rose wasn't certain what to believe anymore, to be quite honest.  The pretty stories people told her were nice, and her memories were painful, but were her memories not the truth of what had happened?

"Darling?"

"Hmm?"

The King's eyes were Briar Rose's favourite feature about him.  In fact, they were the only thing she really liked about him.  They were watery blue, like the ocean, and they were not guarded like the rest of his face.  He couldn't hide anything in his eyes, and this was a welcome relief to Rose, for at this moment, she could see that he was concerned, but more importantly, irritated that she was ignoring him.

"Have you ever even met the creature?" the King asked her again.  His attempt at keeping his tone light-hearted caused his voice to sound strangled.  _Surely not_ was etched into his words.

Briar Rose frowned subtly.  "I—"

This was altogether the incorrect response, for suddenly all eyes in the room were upon her, a circumstance she had cleverly avoided since she'd awoken from her sleeping curse years ago.  Her throat felt dry and she struggled to swallow.

"You've met her?" the King whispered, and his eyes flashed with something Rose could not quite define.  Anger, certainly, but also hurt.  Betrayal.

 _How could I ever have told you, my King?_ Briar Rose wondered silently.  _How could I have told you when..._

"You must be mistaken."  There it was, as ever.  "You were under her curse for some time, remember, my love.  Perhaps the beast visited you in your dreams, but it wasn't real."  His hand atop hers.  His hands were warm and dry and large and they made her feel sick whenever he touched her.  "You know that."

_Always telling me what I know._

_What do you know?_

Later that night when the King had gone to sleep, Briar Rose lit from the bed and retreated to the guest room at the opposite end of the hallway.  She needed a bit of fresh air, and though there was a balcony in her own bedroom, there was also Stefan.  Too many times her evening musings had been interrupted by sleepy, cloying hands upon her shoulders, tugging at her nightdress and attempting to entice her back into bed.

Let him at least take a little walk before he found her.

The night was bright even despite the patches of clouds that obscured the stars.  The moon illuminated the courtyards and the village and even the lands beyond...all the way up until it reached Maleficent's domain.

Maleficent lived eternally in the shadows.

And what was more, she liked it that way.

Briar Rose squeezed her eyes closed and clasped her hands against her stomach.  Stefan would have his heir.  Perhaps he would leave her be now.

 _You've met her_ , he breathed like he'd been impaled.

But he couldn't possibly know.  Not everything, anyway.  Briar Rose wasn't even fully certain she knew everything, herself, and she had lived it.  He was a blustering, possessive man in all facets of life.  There was nothing more to it than that.

Again Rose's eyes fell upon the shadowy forest where Maleficent made her home, and for the first time in years, she dared to admit that she missed Maleficent.

* * *

Many years ago—why, now it seemed almost another lifetime—the young Princess Briar Rose had lived her life in near-utter seclusion.  She was forbidden from speaking to anyone apart from the three little fairies who looked after her, the occasional serving maid, and her betrothed, the future King of their united realms.  But he was many years her senior and lived very far away, so she seldom saw him.  When she was very young, it was easy to push away those lofty words: marriage, husband, ruler, heir...  They meant nothing to her.

The nearer she grew to the age of eighteen, though, the more real her situation became.  That was around the time she'd learned how to sneak out of the castle and into the woods that surrounded it on all but one side.

Rose had been petrified at first.  Not only had she feared what would befall her if she were caught, but she'd been told horror stories of what lay in those woods: fearsome animals and evil fairies and things she could not even conceptualize.

But Rose found to her surprise and delight that the animals of the forest somehow instinctively liked her, and even the forest itself seemed to bow to her whims and needs.  Sometimes in the summer if she thought she could get away with it, she spent an entire night curled up under the stars with only the trees for shelter, then hurried back to her room at the first light of dawn.

It was on one of these nights, when the moon was full and the night was crystal clear, that Maleficent had come upon her.

She'd awoken with a start, and at first couldn't imagine any particular reason why.  She felt uneasy, as though she were being watched, and she realized that the woods were eerily silent.  A shadow fell over her, and she looked up to see an imposing person shrouded in an elegant cloak, carrying what appeared to be a sorcerer's staff.

"Hello?" Rose offered meekly.

"Hasn't anyone ever told you the woods are dangerous at night?" the mysterious woman asked her.  Her voice was light and lilting, almost musical.  It was a fairy's voice, but this did not look like any fairy Rose had ever encountered.

Rose did her best to rise gracefully to her feet, but she imagined it came off more like frantic scrambling.  "Shouldn't I say the same to you?"

The fairy woman's curiously light eyes shone in the moonlight, but her face was still obscured by the hood of her cloak.  "Perhaps I am the danger," she replied.

Briar Rose knew so little of so many things, and her only notions of danger were stories she'd been told to keep her from trying to run away.  Could she be blamed if the prospect of real danger, while perhaps frightening, was also just the tiniest bit exhilarating?

"Is that true?" she wondered breathlessly.

As her eyes adjusted, Rose could see just the slightest hint of the fairy woman's face as her lips curled into a smile that held a tantalizing challenge.  "Dare you find out?"

Rose swallowed the lump in her throat and willed her courage to steady her.  Years later, she could see that it was not courage, but the blissful brazenness of naiveté that had truly spurred her on.  "I'd sooner court a little danger than live out all my days in a gilded cage."

The fairy woman's cloak fell from her head with a dramatic flourish, and Briar Rose saw that she was beautiful.  She possessed that kind of bizarre, flawless symmetry that left one breathless.  Rose exhaled almost forcibly and found it was difficult to steady her breathing thereafter.

"Now," said the fairy woman with a wicked grin that left Rose week in the knees, "who said anything about courting me?"

"I—I didn't—" Rose stammered.

"I think this shall be a bit of fun," said the fairy woman smugly.  "It's been so long since I made a pretty human stumble over her words."

At the time, the words hadn't made very much sense to her, nor had she been able to put a name to the curious sensations coursing through her body.  Her knees were weak, her skin was tingly all over, and there was an indescribable ache between her legs from which every other inexplicable symptom seemed somehow to stem.

She'd decided to name the feeling she associated with the mysterious woman a mixture of excitement and terror, and even years later, in the deepest confines of her own mind, she had a difficult time admitting that amidst the excitement and the terror had been overwhelming attraction, the likes of which she'd never known before or hence.

"So you are a fairy," she'd said at the time.

"After a fashion," the woman replied.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"When one calls a fairy to mind, does one not picture something a bit different?"

"Does that matter to you?" Rose wondered.  "What people think?"

The fairy woman's icy eyes twinkled in the moonlight.  "Perhaps it does, a bit more than I'd like," she said coolly.  Then, abruptly, something about her shifted, and she seemed suddenly to be advancing upon Rose, even though she hadn't moved or changed her posture.  "But that's quite enough about me for the moment, o brave little human."

Instinctively, Rose took a step backward.

"Does milady hail from yon castle?" wondered the fairy.  "Is that the gilded cage of which she speaks?"

Rose didn't want to answer right away.  She had the sinking sensation that once she started talking, her words might spill over and she'd have no way of stopping them.  She would say too much—far, far too much—to this exciting, terrifying fairy woman who had so suddenly and so completely regained the upper hand without so much as lifting a finger.  Rather than damn herself with the probability of too many words, Rose nodded silent affirmation.

"Not a servant, by the look of her pretty night dress," said the fairy woman.  Rose felt suddenly very exposed, and took another step backward, but she found that there was a tree directly behind her where she hadn't remembered a tree a moment prior.  "And I am given to understand that the lower nobility are afforded considerable freedom when compared to that of the mysterious princess."

Rose didn't need to speak, and she knew it.  Her guilt shone crimson red all over her face.

"Well," said the fairy woman.  "I beg your pardon, Highness.  I had no idea I was in the presence of a living legend."

"A what?" Rose's surprise momentarily superseded her unwillingness to say too much.

"The mysterious princess is the talk of the village, of course," replied the fairy woman.  "Does that surprise you?  No one has so much as glimpsed your face since you were an infant.  Some imagine in the early morning hours that they might hear your singing coming from the castle gardens," she tilted her head studiously, "but that's nonsense, surely."

The idea that people wondered about her...that people of whom Briar Rose hadn't even the slightest concept wondered what she was like, thought they heard her singing in the mornings, was so baffling that she couldn't wrap her head around it for many days to come.  The revelation that someone had heard her singing, or more precisely, that she hadn't found the joy in her heart to sing in many months now, filled her with a weary sadness that caused her shoulders to slump.

"The princess used to sing," the fairy woman guessed, quietly, but not quite gently.  She was all sharp edges and eerie shadows and reflected moonlight.  A reflection of a reflection, as it were.  "Pray, what sorrow has silenced her song?"

Rose bowed her head and squeezed her eyes closed.  She tried to fight back the words that wanted so desperately to fall from her lips, but they weighed on her chest, pulling her ever downward, and a small part of her wondered if, perhaps, were she allowed to share her pain, it might feel just a tiny bit better.

"Inevitability," she breathed.  "Destiny."

The fairy woman was silent, and that was all the encouragement Rose needed to continue, quietly, breathlessly, a hurried whisper of words never meant to be spoken aloud, let alone heard.

"It's always been there, of course, the promise that I must marry the Prince and become Queen of these united kingdoms, but it felt unreal and far away when I was younger, and it never found its way into my song..."  She wrapped her arms around her body, uncertain whether the chill she suddenly felt so acutely came from without or from within.  "But now...now it draws so nigh, and he visits too often, and I don't..."

 _I don't love him_.

"But that doesn't matter, of course.  It's..."

 _It's more that I don't even like him_.

"I shouldn't complain," she finished lamely.

"You shouldn't sleep in the forest, either," said the fairy woman pleasantly.  "I don't see why propriety should stop you from something so innocuous as speaking."

"Innocuous?" Rose echoed.  "I don't know what sort of world you live in, where speech is innocuous."  In Briar Rose's experience, simple words could unite nations or fell them, could change lives or ruin them, or take them away.

"In my world, as you put it," the fairy woman replied, "a word is but a fraction of a deed."

Rose considered this, considered what few actions she took, and what few she was permitted, and at the time, she found she could not comprehend the fairy woman's assertion.

"It must be nice to be able to do as you please," she said, not a little contemptuously.

"I suppose it must be," the fairy woman agreed, or seemed to.

As it turned out, the greatest understanding the two of them would ever reach was exactly how catastrophically they misunderstood one another.


End file.
